Samsung has pledged to double its Rambus output or die in the attempt. Actually, the last part isn't true, but such was the tenor of the company's press conference on the matter we did wonder quite how far it would go. The Korean giant is currently pumping out around one million 128/144Mb Rambus chips each month, having resumed production last month after a month's hiatus caused by Intel's blunders over the Rambus-supporting i820 chipset. That figure will rise to two million parts per month next February, said the president of Samsung's semiconductor operations, Yoon-Woo Lee. He also said that Rambus chips will account for around 20 per cent of the company's memory sales next year, double the figure for the memory business as a whole. Given the demand for Rambus memory -- quite apart from the PC business, Sony is going to want shedloads of the chips next year for its PlayStation 2 -- and what manufacturers can get away with charging for it, Samsung's focus makes plenty of sense. And with Samsung actively trying to shrink the size of Rambus chips -- it's looking to cut the number of in-chip memory banks from 32 to 16 by the middle of 2000 -- it should do very nicely, thank you, out of the technology. ® Related StoryRambus Ink has brilliant future